Hydrogen Dream
February 18, 2008
Hydrogen Dream
by Daniel Steinbock
My dreams are made of stars
and stars are made of hydrogen.
And though I dream out loud,
I hardly know where to begin,
when dreams are made of hydrogen.
And you carried away the stone.
From my broken back, you lift the heavy load.
And you carried away the stone…
These arms were made to hold you,
your body, the Universe.
And only eyes can show you
what is greater than these many words:
your body is the Universe.
And you danced away the storm.
My broken wings were all at once restored.
And you danced away the storm…
Love was made to disarm.
Love will make you whole again.
And when I cried out loud,
twas Love that led me home again,
where dreams are made of hydrogen.
And you sang up the Sun.
My broken voice could never reach that note.
And we sang up the Sun…
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Personal Archaeology
December 29, 2007
Today I found some very old writings of mine — going all the way back to sixth grade — and was pretty floored by what I read. This all came about because my mother is moving out of the house I grew up in and was ready to toss my first personal computer, an Apple IIGS that we got around 1987. It’s been sitting in the greenhouse out back for about ten years. Curious to see if it still worked and if I could access my childhood word processing files, I set it up in the kitchen, dusted it off, and booted up.
It worked perfectly. I had of course attached funny sound clips from Star Trek, Robo Cop and 2001 to every single system event: windows opening and closing, diskettes inserted and ejected, programs launched, trash filled and emptied. And I found my old writings from sixth through ninth grades, up until we bought our first Windows PC, a 486 DX33. For kicks, I’m going to send my Apple data to RetroFloppy to convert it to a format I read on my MacBook Pro. They’ll even make a entirely virtual version of my old computer (a disk image) that I can boot up in an Apple IIGS emulator!
I haven’t found my oldest writings from pre-sixth grade which must be around here on some 5.25″ floppy disk. That would include my first play, a re-telling of the Greek myth about Paris, Helen and the Golden Apple.
However, I did find a number of early glimpses at my young self. Here’s one that really made me laugh…and wonder in amazement. I’m guessing it’s from the Fall of 1990, near the start of sixth grade. I can’t honestly say I remember what it was like to be that sixth grader. But reading this makes me think I haven’t really changed all that much in essence.
Posted by Daniel in : Personal, SocietyA Proclamation
Be it known by all people that the first week in January is hereby proclaimed to be “Philosophical Awareness Week.”
It is important to recognize Philosophical Awareness this week for the following reasons:
- Philosophy is important in every person’s life. It is important to explore our innermost feelings and opinions, which we may hide from other people.
- The study of Philosophy has been neglected for some time and by proclaiming Philosophical Awareness Week, we can rejuvenate this long forgotten mental discipline.
- The development of a personal philosophy is crucial in the growth process of humans as individuals.
The following activities should be carried out this week in honor of this proclamation (in addition to any special projects, activities, or field trips that might be conducted to make this proclamation even more meaningful):
- Single or numerous colored ribbons are to be worn on the body, signifying the observance of Philosophical Awareness Week.
- Philosophical Awareness Week is to be observed starting with the first Sunday of the year. The following Friday is to be a holiday from school and labor.
- While on holiday, people observing Philosophical Awareness Week for its true meaning should participate in relaxing, enjoyable activities that exercise the skills of the philosopher or of being creative, such as: painting, drawing, arts and crafts; story, play or poetry writing; composing or playing original music; conversing on the subject of philosophy; sharing one’s own philosophical beliefs and expanding on one’s philosophical thoughts.
Signed,
Daniel Steinbock
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The Science of Oneness
March 9, 2007
A bit of personal history. Below appears my valedictory speech from when I graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Youthful disclaimer: Apart from being grandiose, I take creative license with biology, genetics and computer science to serve my own save-the-world agenda.
Late morning sun is warm and bright, here at the June edge of a Santa Cruz summer. A fabulous condition. The 2000+ crowd of moms, dads, grandparents, professors, friends and lovers fills the Porter College quad to overflowing. They churn in happy cacophany. In the middle of it all: the black-robed block of soon-to-be-graduates, sweating in the sun. And up above, the great oak trees sway, their music inaudible above the crowd sound.
I am sitting behind the provost, faculty and fellows on stage, eyes closed in meditation. I listen to the sentimental speeches: a dance professor who urges us to be passionate people; a fellow student who bears to us her honeycomb heart; the provost who commends our achievements and foretells our great works. Meanwhile, the breath goes in and out, and with it goes all fear, anxiety, pride, hesitation. The provost calls my name and I rise, black robes flowing toward the heavy podium and an ocean of faces. With palms laid face-up on the wood I speak:
“This is dedicated to the one I love…..”
An eruption of smiles and laughter as I pause before completing the invocation:
“….You.”
I look into the crowd before me and begin a slow scan of the faces. Trying, to the limit of my ability, to make eye contact with each and every person. As I do, they slowly catch on to the meaning of my words. Now the smiles are ten-fold wider, the laughter ten-fold louder. There are a lot of people in the audience. It takes a long time. I make a complete circle, turning to include the faculty and administrators sitting behind me, until once again I am facing the ocean, now totally silent but vibrating with glee. Up above, I hear the wind blowing through the oak trees like a great, invisible breath. I begin.
I come before you in this moment, not as a bearer of words, but of a Word.
The human genome is a single, glorious Word three billion letters in length. And though spelled from an alphabet of only four characters, this one Word is more profound than all the words uttered by all our poets. For the sound of its articulation is the human being, and, by extension: all the poetry, the cave paintings, and the atom bombs that have sprung from our hands, mouths and minds.
Human creativity is Nature’s creativity, expressing through us.
Now science races to transcribe the text of our genome. When UC Santa Cruz became the first institution to share this text freely on the Internet for all to see, our species took one more step in a great Initiation. For with the deciphering of DNA’s code, the flesh will be made Word. We will step back to contemplate the very bodies in which we are clothed.
Through the vehicle of human cognition, Nature is striving to understand itself. And the arrival of this understanding will serve as The Great Reminder: that we and every species of plant, animal and microbe are branches on a Tree of Life that has been growing on this planet for three and a half billion years. Each branch is a unique expression of Nature’s endless creativity; humanity is but the most recent branchlet, straining up toward the Sun.
Did you know? You share half your genetic code with common yeast. You are 90% genetically identical to the field mouse, and only 1% separates you from the chimpanzee.
I pause as the graduates break out in wild monkey hoots and screeches (a Porter College tradition frowned upon by the administration).
Posted by Daniel in : Ethics, Personal, SocietyAnd the difference between you and everyone else in this audience? A mere tenth of a percent.
What makes humankind unique among all the branches in the Tree of Life? It is our Creative Intellect, reflecting in microcosm Nature’s own creative power to fashion novel forms out of our environment. So our own creations, artistic and technological, are themselves yet further branchings in Nature’s Tree.
Thus it’s no wonder that the most advanced developments of our Information Age bear such close resemblance to Nature’s own forms: the World Wide Web, extending our collective memory in a global embrace, bears an ever-increasing resemblance to the brain’s own network organization. Computer scientists design search algorithms based on the foraging patterns of ants. Digital information storage, massively parallel computation, nanotechnology–these are all basic functions of DNA’s double helix. To call these concepts “new” is like the chicken claiming to have invented the egg.
On the Tree of Life, humanity’s Creative Mind is the one and only fruit, nurturing within it the seed — invention! — the vessel by which DNA’s message will be carried to the stars. To plant new gardens before ours is consumed in the fire of our dying Sun.
H.G. Wells wrote, “History is a race between education and disaster.”
Caught up in the dizzying spell that is modern culture, humanity has forgotten its connection to the Tree of Life.
We have forgotten our kinship with every plant and animal.
Forgotten how to live in equilibrium with our environment.
Forgotten the Word, that binds all people as one human family.
Forgotten the true source of our creativity: Nature.
And we have forgotten the stars, though they shine on us every night.
Yet this state of affairs is not tragedy! It is opportunity: for each one of us to apply the creative mind. Whether to design high-technology, adopt ecologically sustainable ways of living, or simply to extend the smile of friendship to strangers you pass in the street. We are all acting out The Great Reminder.
Remember: the stars.
Remember: imagination–the inside of our heads–is the greatest frontier.
Remember: You are the Tree of Life, branches reaching upward for the Sun, ever-seeking new possibilities for being.
And what is, perhaps, closest to being, is beginning.
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Edward Tufte’s Personal Utopia
December 3, 2006
Edward Tufte spoke at Stanford this afternoon and I had the pleasure of being in attendance. It was an unconventional talk, as far as academic lectures go, for Tufte was speaking “in the first person” about his own life: his origins in rural Nebraska, his education and formative years, his mentors who influenced his thinking, and the turning points that signaled moments of profound reorientation. As Tufte noted, for a sample size of N=1, the estimated variance is infinite; so other sources should be consulted.
Tufte has had a remarkable career and speaks as someone who appears to have found the courage to follow his bliss, leaving a tenured professorship at Yale to self-publish his famous books on visual information, go on speaking tours, and make large-scale landscape art in his Connecticut backyard.
There were three big lessons I took away from his talk.
Contribute to forever knowledge.
The most important decision a researcher makes is choosing what problem to focus on. One should choose problems that are not only profoundly important, but ones for which good progress is possible. It’s worth nothing to work on grand problems and make no progress. Tufte’s own compass for this decision: contribute to Forever Knowledge. That is, create knowledge that will be universally useful to humankind in any time or place in human history. Tufte ditched his career as a political economy theorist because he found he was working on only temporarily important problems, things he decided were not worth his “time, energy, passion and mind.”
Be self-exemplifying.
In whatever one’s work, be not only a great communicator of ideas and practices, be an exemplar of those same practices and this will communicate the value of what you are saying far better than anything else. Tufte’s books are not only superb treatises on the visual display of of information, they are also exemplary demonstrations of clear visual communication.
Strive for personal utopia.
Here again, Tufte is, as he presents it, self-exemplifying. While utopian states may be unreachable, you can pretty well approximate an ideal life through clarity of purpose, courage to act on that purpose, and, most importantly, doing what you love.
The poem Tufte opened his talk with was excerpted from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, fitting for a self-reflection.
Posted by Daniel in : Personal, Science Culture, VisualizationTime present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
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Collective Decision Making at Los Alamos Lab
November 29, 2006
My collaborators at Los Alamos National Lab, Marko Rodriguez and Jennifer Watkins, just launched a web presence for the Collective Decision Making Systems project, an umbrella for their research on prediction markets, voting systems, and related topics (some of which I’ve helped out on). Keep an eye on these two — they mix technical brilliance with imagination, and that’s a potent combination.
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